City statuses and privileges in the Roman East have attracted much scholarly attention in recent decades, going back to the seminal work of Louis Robert and to Simon Price's epoch-making study of imperial cult in Asia Minor. More immediately, Guerber's monograph comes in the wake of Rudolf Haensch's monumental Capita provinciarum, the important monograph by Anna Heller on inter-city rivalries in the provinces of Asia and Bithynia, Barbara Burrell's fundamental study of the neocoria, and a great deal of detailed work on the conventus system, membership of the Panhellenion, and other related matters besides. Much of the necessary source material is being brought together through the ongoing Roman Provincial Coinage and Lexikon der Aufschriften auf griechischen Münzen projects. Guerber's work is, however, the first to cover both the whole of the Greek-speaking East (with the sadly inevitable exception of Egypt) from the reign of Augustus to that of Tacitus and (almost) the whole range of statuses and privileges. It will be, particularly given the amount of new evidence that has come to light in recent years, an extremely valuable reference resource, and this is the main (and undoubtedly sufficient) justification for its appearance in book format: there is no genuinely new overarching argument, whereas numerous important observations on particular problems might have been more visible if published as articles. G.'s detailed footnotes need to be read with attention by anybody who is interested in the same subjects and much information is conveniently tabulated for the first time, e.g. on the attestations of autonomous status (59) or grants of colonial status (389–93). G. could benefit from the publication of the Roman treaty with Lycia (SEG LV 1452) and especially of the letters of Hadrian to Dionysiac artists (SEG LVI 1359), discussed in detail in ch. 3.

The treatment is arranged topically and proceeds roughly in the order of first attestation of a particular institution. Seven chapters cover ‘the privilege of freedom’ (a phrase borrowed from the famous study of the Latin West by F. Jacques), the provincial koina together with neocories and the metropolis status, sacred festivals, the conuentus system, the title of ‘first in the province’, the title of nauarchis, and, finally, promotion to colonial status. Asylia and the status of caput prouinciae are left out of consideration.

Methodologically, the stress is on continuities and on viewing developments, in the Annales tradition, ‘sur la longue durée, dans un cadre géographique étendu’ (15). It is to be all the more regretted that the principate of Augustus has been taken as a starting date. This leads G. to giving a somewhat truncated account of the status of free and federate cities in ch. 1 (only 45 pages as opposed to 88 on sacred festivals in the High Empire) and of the conuentus system in ch. 4. It seems dangerous to discuss the ‘free status’ or the rôle of foedera (downplayed by G.) without addressing their Republican roots in more detail, though perhaps that argument has been reserved for another monograph, announced as forthcoming in the bibliography, Liberté grecque et intégration dans l'Empire romain. In the same way, ch. 7, dealing with promotions to the status of Roman colony, discusses purely titular promotions of the third century a.d. without the context of earlier Roman settlements in the region (sometimes within already existing Greek cities) and their status. Notably, B. Levick, Roman Colonies in Southern Asia Minor (1967), is absent from the bibliography.

On the status of free cities, while (rightly in my view) treating R. Bernhardt's theory of connection between free status and fiscal immunity with caution, G. still goes further than many in viewing the rights of free cities as relatively uniform and quite extensive. On a number of points his views may be doubted: the term philanthropa for the city privileges which he sees as replaced in the imperial period by that of dikaia, reflecting perhaps a perception of city liberty as a ‘right’ (66), does in fact appear in an important decree of Maroneia (I.Thrak.Aig. E180, fragm. A, l. 14) not discussed by G.; it is perhaps dangerous to assume (62) that local legislative activity was in no way restricted in autonomous cities (compare restrictions on grants of local citizenship at Termessus and Tyras: RS 19, col. I, ll. 1–8; IGRR I 598, ll. 23–8). Nonetheless, the stress on the surviving practical importance of the free status is very welcome.

Treatment of other institutions pays much attention to the new hierarchies of city privileges developing in the imperial period, without strikingly new conclusions, but often suggesting new nuances, as for example on the attractiveness of colonial status. A stress on regional peculiarities is perhaps the most interesting: while attention paid to different provinces is inevitably uneven, G.'s case for certain fundamental distinctions between Achaia and the rest of the Roman East is attractive. To what extent these distinctions reflect the cultural pride of the ‘old Greece’ is, of course, a more difficult question. Ch. 6 gives the best analysis of the little-discussed title nauarchis.

Inevitably, given the state of our evidence and the vast field covered by G., parts of this review have been dedicated to points of disagreement. This should not obscure the fact that this is a work of solid epigraphic and numismatic scholarship and that it will be useful for any student of the Roman East under the Empire.